The lack of clarity around quantization is made particularly acute in the case of the gravitational field, which plays a dual role in GR as an object with genuine dynamical modes, but one that also serves to establish spatial and temporal relationships. This calls into question the precise nature of the gravitational field. Is it just another field to be quantized, along the lines of the gauge fields of Yang-Mills theories, or is it something else entirely? Canonical approaches to QG, such as LQG, have wagered, with varying degrees of success, that the former is true. But there are various clues (see e.g., [1]}-[2]}) suggesting that gravity is an emergent, statistical phenomenon, not unlike temperature and pressure in statistical physics. Would any physicist quantize a temperature field? Perhaps not, but this is exactly what we might be doing when we quantize the gravitational field.
